Shame on the President shame on the Democrats

[sageofthpalouse]

Early this year Congress restored payroll taxes to finance the SSI and Medicare trust funds - savings accounts in effect, where a chunk of wages from your labor is diverted each payday to sit gathering interest. Decades later, you hope, it will be doled back as an “entitlement

Comments

[sageofthpalouse]

Dear Carol - the majority of voters oppose the cuts, but only a small minority understand that economic lies and a fake crisis have been manufactured to justify cutting. That means most voters just argue about what to cut and how much, instead of focusing on solving the real problems of unemployment and student debt.

Facebook has power and heart but those strengths do not serve well to understand geeky macroeconomics.

The economic issue is my real purpose here. The trust funds are one more fake crisis and a potential teachable moment for economics. If the three or four people who read this blog occasionally can be riled up to break through for deeper insight into how the economy works ... great!

Most people have intense mental opposition to challenging economic facts & logic. My experience is people minds cannot be changed. They must be shocked into dropping their prior beliefs which is very unlikely, but they probably will be alienated from the messenger in any case. Just not a role I want yet on something as exposed as Facebook. If you find powerful vivid imagery to support economic insight, please let me know, Facebook would be the place for it.

[carol_da_queen]

I think the charts...so visually powerful are the best for me.
Sadly so many folks hate 'math' and won't even really ponder or try to understand something with numbers....even very important ones.

[sageofthpalouse]

Numbers are pretty unintuitive: one, two, "many" ... and we're lost in the "many"

Macroeconomics also is rife with logic traps. Especially fallacies of composition ... maybe charts could show paradox of thrift, stuff like that? Hmmm.

I'm still convinced logic and facts are not the key ... it requires more like an epiphany for older people who have worked for their money.